Stuff You'll Like

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Amazon Prime isn't just for next-day toilet paper anymore: Your subscription includes countless movies to stream, ranging from recent blockbusters to old-school faves. Here's a slew of options for you, whether you're in the mood for sci-fi, a rom-com, or anything in-between -- the best Amazon movies out of the thousands of Amazon movies.

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A Ghost Story (2017)

Director David Lowery (Pete's Dragon) conceived this dazzling, dreamy meditation on the afterlife during the off-hours on a Disney blockbuster, making the revelations within even more awe-inspiring. After a fatal accident, a musician (Casey Affleck) finds himself as a sheet-draped spirit, wandering the halls of his former home, haunting/longing for his widowed wife (Rooney Mara). With stylistic quirks, enough winks to resist pretension (a scene where Mara devours a pie in one five-minute, uncut take is both tragic and cheeky), and a soundscape culled from the space-time continuum, A Ghost Story connects the dots between romantic love, the places we call home, and time -- a ghost's worst enemy.

Anomalisa (2015)

Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's intoxicating stop-motion-animated drama mixes existential crisis and self-discovery in a way that's at once depressing as hell and uplifting. Honing in on a popular motivational speaker's business trip, the duo tackles the pitfalls of the mundane while making a movie that's anything but. David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh play characters so rich, you'll soon forget they're lending their voices to puppets.

Arrival (2016)

Based on a novella by acclaimed science-fiction writer Ted Chiang, Arrival abandons space operatics and alien super-weapons to tell a first-contact story about the virtues of communication. When a squadron of spacecrafts touches down in remote areas of the globe, the Army enlists a linguist (Amy Adams) to "speak" to the extraterrestrial squids inside. Through code-breaking and conversation, our human heroes learn a little about this highly intelligent species and even more about their emotional capacity. Methodical and chilly, almost to a fault, Arrival delivers one of the biggest twists in recent memory. Like, maybe we Earthlings could learn to get along.

Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016)

More than a decade after the last Barbershop, the gang's debates on relationships, gender, family, and age gaps are even wilder, thanks to Ice Cube's bro-heavy barbershop sharing floor space with Regina Hall and Nicki Minaj's salon. And in the hands of Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver (Survivor's Remorse), they're crucial. The barbershop, always a safe haven, is embroiled in gang violence and city bureaucracy. Cube's Calvin, his staff, and his patrons find their usual fire silenced by tragedy. Names like Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin are on the tips of these characters' tongues. The movie has the dramatic prowess to make it work, swinging from hard laughs -- Common, New Girl's Lamorne Morris, and the fiery Minaj steal the show -- to potent drama.

The Big Sick (2017)

Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily Gordon adapted their real-life meet cute, and an encounter with illness that landed Emily in the hospital just months afterward, into this moving, melancholy rom-com -- like a Terms of Endearment for the Trainwreck era. Fans of the comedian's stand-up or work as Silicon Valley's Dinesh will go nuts for The Big Sick's steady stream of laughs; one taboo-busting 9/11 joke-for-the-ages had my theater howling. But when the couple's life takes a turn for the worse, and Kumail's Pakistani heritage pressurizes the situation with demands of arranged marriage, Nanjiani's fans will cling to the jokes like a life preserver. Anchored by his sensitive performance, and bolstered by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter as Emily's fretting, foulmouthed parents, The Big Sick is a reminder that fate is fickle, self-determination is fickler, and we all deserve a good laugh-cry once in awhile.

Black Hawk Down (2001)

It's hard to tell the actors apart in Black Hawk Down: they're all dressed in military fatigues, often with helmets and goggles that obscure their faces; there's dust everywhere; and yelling is the preferred method of communication. To say that Ridley Scott's chronicle of a 1993 US military raid in Mogadishu doesn't cohere isn't exactly a negative critique. It's a part of the movie's frenzied, discombobulating aesthetic. Faces blur. The soundtrack pummels you with gunfire. Helicopters whirl overhead. It's experiential, the type of movie that's tough to shake -- even on a puny computer screen.

Blue Velvet (1986)

David Lynch's twitchy riff on film noir is the link between our reality and our dreams, each frame zooming in on the drips of suburbia melting into hell. Dennis Hopper deep-breathing into a gas mask doesn't have to make sense, it just does.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

This Western-by-way-of-Cannibal Holocaust offers the aging Kurt Russell a pure hero role. Because there’s nothing like troglodytes with a hunger for human flesh to vindicate the way of the gun. Touting a cannon of a six-shooter and a mustache to match, Russell’s no-bullshit sheriff leads a band of stand-up dudes into enemy territory. The sight of blood and guts and more blood and more guts and so much blood and so many guts doesn’t rattle him. He rides forward, determined, like a true badass.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)

Vince Vaughn is a very tall man. Writer and director S. Craig Zahler, the filmmaker behind 2015's brutal cannibal Western Bone Tomahawk, uses the motor-mouthed actor's imposing height as a blunt weapon in Brawl in Cell Block 99, his bone-crushing prison film. As Bradley Thomas, a bald-headed ex-con who gets sent to jail after a series of semi-tragic criminal mishaps, Vaughn fills the frame with his body, occasionally contorting his limbs for comedy but mostly thrusting them at his enemies in the movie's patiently filmed, incredibly graphic action set-pieces. The cinematic violence makes John Wick look like the Teletubbies. At the same time, Zahler invests the story with a depth of feeling rarely seen in such grisly genre fare.

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Capote (2005)

The late Philip Seymour Hoffman delivered an Oscar-winning performance as writer Truman Capote, whose process of reporting out his acclaimed 1966 nonfiction book, In Cold Blood, is documented in this solemn, sepia-blanched biopic. Like the author, Capote is fashionable and observant, a vehicle for a chameleon transformation while bubbling with psychology. Capote never finished another book after tracing back the events of a quadruple murder. The film grapples with why.

Computer Chess (2013)

If you wish Best in Show were weirder and had more awkward pauses, Computer Chess is for you. The halcyon days of pre-internet computer programming get the mockumentary treatment, as teams of programmers descend on a California hotel -- shared with a mysterious, alt-spiritual self-help group -- to duke it out in a battle to determine whose computer plays the best chess. Director Andrew Bujalski shot mostly on old Sony black-and-white tube cameras, giving the film a delightfully lo-fi look that heightens the humor of characters' bold statements that computers will one day beat humans at chess AND will unlock new dating possibilities. When you want something completely different, try Computer Chess.

The Conversation (1974)

If you think domestic surveillance is spooky, imagine how it feels for the guy on the other end of the microphone. Starring Gene Hackman in his prime, Francis Ford Coppola's subdued thriller builds paranoia out of an overheard conversation and the lengths to which one private investigator goes to uncover its meaning. Hackman’s Harry Caul can only get so close to his subjects, and Coppola plays by similar rules, making sound as essential to the viewing experience as picture. Wildly influential, this one will have you looking over your shoulder for days.

Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)

Building on the over-the-top sensibility they explored in 2006's Crank, writer and director team Neveldine/Taylor unsurprisingly take the "more is better" approach to this action movie sequel starring Jason Statham. Unlike the Transporter movies, which try to make the bald-headed Englishman look as cool as possible, the Crank films are all about putting his hapless character Chev Chelios in humiliating positions: the guy gets beat up worse than Wile E. Coyote. In this one, his heart has been replaced with a battery and he needs to keep it charged -- or die trying. It takes the "Speed but with a human" idea of the first Crank to dizzying, hilarious heights.

Creed (2015)

Ryan Coogler's ferocious boxing story is all about legacy. Watching Michael B. Jordan's Adonis Creed struggle to accept his own father's name becomes a complex metaphor for the movie's own tricky relationship with Sylvester Stallone's iconic 1976 original. How loyal to the past should we be? Coogler doesn't have the answers, but, like his work in Fruitvale Station, the director raises tough questions with tenacity and grace.

The End of the Tour (2015)

Follow Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) as he trails David Foster Wallace along the last stops of the book tour for his hugely successful, career-defining Infinite Jest. There's an awful lot of navel-gazing (too much, some argue) as the two dudes cruise through endless Midwestern winter landscapes and talk through their views on work and life, but Jason Segel's quiet, subtle performance as Wallace and the real-life friendship the film centers on are more than enough to capture your attention.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

What Dazed and Confused did for the hazy, hedonistic high-school years, Everybody Wants Some!! does for the horn-dog college experience, a moment when lives reboot and anything is possible. On the first weekend before school, incoming freshman Jake (Blake Jenner) joins his new baseball team brethren to party like he's never partied before, rolling through disco joints, punk clubs, house parties blasting Van Halen, and every vice under the sun. The perfect cast keeps Everybody Wants Some!! light on its feet. Every foul line out of Glen Powell's motorized mouth kills. Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, Will Brittain, and newcomer Temple Baker carve out specific personalities -- a mix of macho, stoned, naive, and dumb as bricks -- that are instantly recognizable. Zoey Deutch, as one of the movie's lone female voices, levels the playing field with ambitious perspective. Save for a handful of broad scenes that belong in Wet Hot American Summer, Linklater's "spiritual sequel" is a classic on par with Dazed. It's the perfect kick-back-and-chill movie, a combo of fastball jokes and unexpected wisdom backed by a 1980s jukebox. You want to hang out with these dudes.

Fences (2016)

This adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a national service. Most of us didn't catch the playwright's sixth "Pittsburgh Cycle" installment when it debuted on Broadway in 1987, nor did we see Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in the acclaimed revival in 2010. Thanks to a commitment by Washington to film Wilson's body of work, the world can now witness this tightly wound examination of African-American life, adapted for film by Wilson himself (he completed the screenplay before his death in 2005). Washington's grasp on theatrical camerawork amplifies the speeches of his ex-Negro League ballplayer Troy. The patriarch is a man and a monster, a character we're all lucky to behold.

Free Fire (2017)

Cast from the molten barrels of Charles Bronson's many Smith & Wessons, this frenetic '70s throwback plays out as one prolonged shootout. What should be just-another-illegal-gun-deal-by-the-docks between a group of IRA fighters (led by Cillian Murphy), a skeezy arms dealer (Sharlto Copley), and two American representatives for the respective parties (Brie Larson and Armie Hammer) explodes into a firefight when one lower-rung goon accuses another of assaulting his sister at a bar the night prior. Each insult exacerbates the standoff, which director Ben Wheatley orchestrates with wailing bullets, chaotic camerawork, and salvos of clever banter, blurted out as the actors squirm across dirt floors to safety. By the end of Free Fire, limbs are torn through, blood is spilled, and your jaw is on the floor.

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Gangs of New York (2002)

This 19th century crime epic is probably not your favorite Martin Scorsese movie, but don't hold the Goodfellas director's considerable tough guy pedigree against him. In his first collaboration with Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio shakes off his heartthrob Titanic reputation by getting down and dirty as goatee-sporting tough guy Amsterdam Vallon. But Leo has an iceberg-sized problem: Daniel Day-Lewis. As the violent, ill-tempered Bill the Butcher, the method actor extraordinaire is a terror in a top hat, stealing the whole movie with his wild-eyed magnetism.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2017)

If you're fed up with "young adult dystopia," and equally over the zombie movie, The Girl with All the Gifts is good news. The movie combines both genres into one tasty combo plate that's unexpected at every turn. It's about a group of survivors who accompany a young zombie/human hybrid into the wilderness after their facility is invaded. A weird one, but it's also really quite good.

Green Room (2015)

Green Room is a throaty, thrashing, spit-slinging punk tune belted through an invasion-movie microphone at max volume. It's nasty -- and near-perfect. As a band of 20-something rockstars recklessly defend against a neo-Nazi battalion equipped with machetes, shotguns, and snarling guard dogs, the movie blossoms into a savage coming-of-age tale, an Almost Famous for John Carpenter nuts. Anyone looking for similar mayhem should check out director Jeremy Saulnier's previous movie, the low-budget, darkly comic hillbilly noir, Blue Ruin, also streaming on Amazon.

The Handmaiden (2016)

Some movies splash across the screen, others turn scenes into bold brushstrokes. The Handmaiden, an erotic thriller with twists and turns and thrusts aplenty, is Park Chan-wook's drip painting. Set in 1930s Korea, the movie follows Sook-hee, a pickpocket, who slips undercover into the staff of a sheltered heiress, with hopes of luring the deep-pocketed woman into the romantic grasp of her con-man partner in crime. The problem: Sook-hee falls madly, lustfully in love with her target. In The Handmaiden, single, sensual drops -- a prolonged glance, the zipping up of a dress, whispered white lies -- fan out through the entire two-and-a-half-hour narrative into the unexpected. You will not see a craftier movie this year.

Iron Man (2008)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe began here. There's something almost quaint about Robert Downey Jr.'s first outing in the big red robo-suit, considering how gargantuan, star-powered, and overstuffed modern comic book movies have become. Back in 2008, director Jon Favreau brought a touch of Swingers-like bravado to a genre in desperate need of one-liners, irony, and self-awareness. Almost a decade later, almost all superhero movies share a part of this film's smirking DNA.

It Comes at Night (2017)

In this a post-apocalyptic nightmare-and-a-half, the horrors of humanity, the strain of chaotic emotions pent up in the name of survival, bleed out through wary eyes and weathered hands. The setup is blockbuster-sized -- reverts mankind to the days of the American Frontier, every sole survivor fights to protect their families and themselves -- but the drama is mano-a-mano. Barricaded in a haunted-house-worthy cabin in the woods, Paul (Edgerton) takes in Will (Abbott) and his family, knowing full well they could threaten his family's existence. All the while, Paul's son, Trevor, battles bloody visions of (or induced by?) the contagion. Shults directs the hell out of every slow-push frame of this psychological thriller, and the less we know, the more confusion feels like a noose around our necks, the scarier his observations become.

Landline (2017)

This ripe, relationship comedy is set in the 1990s, a time of pay phones, cigarette-friendly bars, floppy disks, and harder-to-keep secrets. The writer-director's characters all have them: a rebellious high school senior (Abby Quinn) flirting with boys and heroin for the first time; her soon-to-be-married sister (Jenny Slate), who questions everything after a hookup with an old flame; their mother (Edie Falco), who works around the clock and takes flak from all involved; and their father (John Turturro), a wannabe playwright who may or not be carrying on a decade-long affair (the discovery of a dirty poetry stash sends the sisters hunting for answers). Like Obvious Child did for cautious millennial daters, Landline surveys and questions the value of steady relationships. The sprawling story tests Slate's dramatic chops (while feeding the former SNL player plenty of comedy gold), delivers newcomer Quinn a breakout role, and gives Robespierre the chance to whisk us around New York City with the cool of Woody Allen or Hal Ashby. Landline could be the set-up for a great television show, but as a movie, it's a daring and decadent slice of life.

Last Train Home (2009)

Lixin Fan's chronicle of a family torn apart gives us an extraordinary glimpse at the common plight of migrant workers in China. It is an incredibly absorbing film that contains a fluid mix of informative, observational, fabricated, and, in one powerful moment, quite provocative material. It's pretty much a perfect documentary, as it checks off every box for what a work of nonfiction cinema can do. We haven't gotten many docs yet this century that qualify for that level of distinction. Last Train Home is one of the best documentaries ever made.

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The Lobster (2015)

To examine modern love, this baroque, sci-fi rom-com basically splits into two movies: the first is an evisceration of Bachelor-esque monogamy logic, where Colin Farrell's David must find love in 45 days or be turned into an animal (of his choice -- the overlords aren't monsters). The second boots our hero to savage woods, where escaped singles plot terrorist attacks against their romance-obsessed society. Shaded with cool hues and orchestrated like a minor symphony, Farrell and Weisz balance the off-kilter dystopia with vibrant, sexual heat. Outrunning tranquilizer darts never looked so good. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Lobster is original, heartfelt, and an awful date movie. Luckily, that's not a factor for greatness.

The Lost City of Z (2017)

Director James Gray's account of explorer Percy Fawcett's lush and perilous journey through the Amazon is the rare film to capture and channel nature's bewitching power. Charlie Hunnam, rousing and physical, stars as Percy, a turn-of-the-20th-century military man who embarks to South America to map Bolivia and cleanse his family name of scandal. Months of starvation, illness, piranha-infested waters, and encounters with natives end with the near-discovery of a hidden, advanced civilization. Gray makes room for court scenes, WWI battles, tender family drama, and a musical score that can stand alone. But in the end, the verdant unknown of Amazonia that has its way with Fawcett and our senses, reflecting a profound component of human nature.

Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Clocking in at three hours, this story of a handyman (Casey Affleck) who returns home to care for his late brother's teenage son (Lucas Hedges) is an epic of intimate proportions. Affleck's character begins the movie shattered by grief. With each scene, be it a haunting memory, a hilarious back-and-forth with his nephew, or sudden silence so well-timed you feel the winter air fill your lungs, the actor reconstructs writer and director Kenneth Lonergan's jagged pieces into a recognizable figure. Manchester by the Sea is like a five-season series squeezed into a movie-length runtime, or better, an experiential microcosm strewn across one coastal Massachusetts town. Your tear ducts will be no match for this one.

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (2015)

If Tom Cruise is immortal, then every Mission: Impossible film is like getting the chance to sip from his tricked-out Holy Grail. With a fiendishly clever script from Jack Reacher writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, the finest action-sequences-as-adrenaline-soaked-therapy-sessions money can buy, and a captivating performance from newcomer Rebecca Ferguson, the fifth film in this endlessly inventive franchise hit yet another level of delicious absurdity in its exploitation of masculine vanity.

Moonlight (2016)

Chronicling the boyhood years, teenage stretch, and muted adult life of Chiron, a black gay man making it Miami, this triptych altarpiece is at once hyper-specific and cosmically universal. Jenkins roots each moment in the last; Chiron's desire for a lost lover can't burn in a diner booth over a bottle of wine without his beachside identity crisis years prior, blurred and violent, or encounters from deeper in his past, when glimpses of his mother's drug addiction, or the mentoring acts of her crack supplier, felt like secrets delivered in code. Panging colors, sounds, and the delicate movements of its perfect cast like the notes of a symphony, Moonlight is the real deal, a movie that will only grow and complicate as you wrestle with it.

Nerve (2016)

Before they terrified you with Paranormal Activity 3 and 4, directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman made the social media paranoia doc Catfish, an essential document of pre-Tinder online dating. Their new movie Nerve, an Emma Roberts- and Dave Franco-starring techno-thriller about a deadly mobile-gaming app, splits the difference between visceral scares and sly social commentary. It's the rare movie that attempts to mimic the aesthetics of the internet -- emojis, text messages, Skype -- and mostly gets the details of the Pokémon Go era right while still providing old-fashioned scares.

Nightcrawler (2014)

Jake Gyllenhaal gives a career-best performance in this nocturnal noir, playing the haunted, single-minded Lou Bloom, a scavenger of human suffering whose motives are as twisted and opaque as the seedy LA underworld he inhabits. That's news media for you! Be warned: if you’re planning a trip to sunny California, writer-director Dan Gilroy's pitch-black satire will make you see the City of Angels in a whole new light.

Paterson (2016)

William Carlos Williams described his epic poem Paterson as an attempt to mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city." Jarmusch's latest, which follows a guy named Paterson (Driver) who drives a bus around the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and writes poetry like his hero William Carlos Williams during his breaks, strives for similar observation. Very little happens in Paterson (the movie), though within its trials of everyday life, even the slightest tremble of Earth feels cataclysmic (a broken-down bus prompts many to wonder if it'll blow up into a fireball). Jarmusch finds poetry in the murmurs of a Thursday night bar crowd and the bouncing vistas out a bus window. Paterson (the man) senses it too, though a world urging him to publish, cash in, brand tests his eye. In Paterson, Jarmusch has art on the brain, and he makes some in the process.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Steven Spielberg shows his work at every step of his action masterpiece. Indiana Jones' first adventure is like a comic book, flipped through at 24 panels a second. Nazis drag our hero along Cairo's dusty streets, strongmen (and a whirling propeller) threaten to squash him to pulp in the fisticuffs of a lifetime, and a megaton boulder chases him through a cobwebbed labyrinth. Not once through it all does Spielberg slip in a throwaway cut or zig when he should zag just to disorient us. Raiders is immaculate, each angle worth printing out and hanging on the wall. After you're done with it, dive right into Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade, both on Amazon Prime.

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Director Darren Aronofsky's break-out drug drama, which was adapted from a 1978 novel by Hubert Selby Jr., isn't exactly a movie you watch to relax. Using all the cinematic tricks at his disposal, the filmmaker turns the daily grind of addiction into a kinetic, horrifying experience, chopping the story's multiple narratives into hyper-stylized montages that leave your brain reeling. Luckily, the performances -- including a devastating turn from Ellen Burstyn as a TV-worshiping pill addict -- give the movie a complex human dimension that elevates it above a mere exercise in virtuosity.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Quentin Tarantino’s debut is all talk, and mostly bullshit, spewing from the mouths of knuckleheads who just screwed up the diamond heist of a lifetime. Unencumbered by Hollywood’s rules, Tarantino deconstructs masculinity through monologue, standoffs, and the literal removal of body parts (the now-legendary ear scene deserves that status). Speaking of ears, Tarantino has one; the "tipping" scene alone is an apogee of crude, poetic vernacular. Reservoir Dogs will always feel primordial, an introduction to the writer-director's isms and a kickoff for endless imitators.

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Room (2015)

The big-screen adaptation of Emma Donoghue's best-selling novel, about a mother raising her son in captivity after being abducted as a teenager, has built-in challenges. Most of the film takes place in an 11x11 garden shed. And the drama plays out from the perspective of a 5-year-old. But Lenny Abrahamson's film version is as much a cinematic triumph as the book was a literary one. Anchored by stirring performances from 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay and Oscar winner Brie Larson, who cements her status as one of the finest actresses working today, Room is a haunting tribute to survival in the most horrific of circumstances.

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

You know the songs by the Bee Gees and the iconic white suit, but there's more to this gritty slice of New York nightlife than John Travolta's killer dance moves. The story of tough-talking 19-year-old Tony Manero (Travolta) coming of age while taking the train into Manhattan is darker and heavier than the film's brightly lit poster implies. Saturday Night Fever is a movie bristling with anger, resentment, and the agony of dreams deferred. The baby-faced Travolta brings depth and swagger to Tony's tortured journey. And, yes, the soundtrack is incredible.

Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Sheep are not particularly expressive animals. Yet, somehow, in the skilled hands of Aardman Animation, the folks behind claymation classics like Wallace And Gromit and Chicken Run, sheep become oddly poignant, capable of wringing laughter and tears from even the most hardened city folk. With his watchful eyes, floppy ears, and tuffs of white cotton, Shaun is cuter than any Minion. Plus, come on: he’s the only character on this list with such a good theme song that it got its own remix.

Sicario (2015)

Instead of offering detailed policy break-downs, prescriptive analysis of the situation at the border, or insights into minds of drug dealers, this film supplies one product: tension. From its riveting opening raid sequence to its chilling final stand-off at a motel, director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) uses all the tropes of a sleek, militarized action thriller to examine the utter uselessness Emily Blunt's FBI character feels in the face of systematic failure. More video game than 60 Minutes-style investigation, it is throat-punch cinema, a doom-soaked Godspeed You! Black Emperor song of a movie, a sculpture chiseled with bullets.

Silence (2016)

Martin Scorsese spent 20 years developing his adaptation of Shūsaku Endō's novel, the story of two Portuguese Catholic priests who travel to Nagasaki, Japan, to rescue their mentor from religious persecution, and it feels like the minimum time required. Silence is a weathered ark, wrestling with the power and pull of religion from a God's eye view. Sebastião (Andrew Garfield) arrives to Japan to push his scripture. Over his journey, lush, meditative, and bloody, thanks to the Japanese campaign to force Christian priests into apostasy, he will question everything, and beg his savior for guidance. Scorsese asks the Big Questions, making for the most challenging film of the year, beliefs be damned.

Superbad (2007)

The uproarious comedy that kicked off Rogen and Evan Goldberg's writing partnership crams more crude sex jokes than anyone ever thought possible into the heartwarming story of inseparable best friends (Michael Cera and Jonah Hill) on the verge of leaving each other to ship off to college. Factor in some killer party scenes, a then-unknown Emma Stone, and high-school horndogs riffing to their hearts' content, and we all want to be McLovin.

Swiss Army Man (2016)

You might think a movie that opens with a suicidal man riding a farting corpse like a Jet Ski wears thin after the fourth or fifth flatulence gag. You would be wrong. Brimming with imagination and expression, the directorial debut of Adult Swim auteurs "The Daniels" wields sophomoric humor to speak to friendship. As Radcliffe's dead body springs back to life -- through karate-chopping, water-vomiting, and wind-breaking -- he becomes the id to Dano's struggling everyman, who is also lost in the woods. If your childhood backyard adventures took the shape of The Revenant, it would look something like Swiss Army Man, and be pure bliss.

Total Recall (1990)

Skip the completely forgettable Colin Farrell remake from 2012. This Arnold Schwarzenegger-powered, action-filled sci-fi movie is the one to go with. Working from a short story by writer Philip K. Dick, director Paul Verhoeven (Robocop) uses a brain-teasing premise -- you can buy "fake" vacation memories from a mysterious company called Rekall -- to stage one of his hyper-violent, winkingly absurd cartoons. The bizarre images of life on Mars and silly one-liners from Arnold fly so fast that you'll begin to think the whole movie was designed to be implanted in your mind.

Up in the Air (2009)

George Clooney and Anna Kendrick give this story of empty American corporatism a humanity that somehow makes you feel sorry for Clooney, who plays a professional downsizer. The quiet desperation seeping through the constant motion of the film will make you ask yourself the question that seems to be written on the walls of every fluorescent airport the characters pass through: Have I done everything all wrong?

Wiener-Dog (2016)

Four vignettes -- the story of a boy caring for his first pup; Greta Gerwig as a soul-searching, pet-stealing suburbanite; a portrait of a college screenwriting professor; and an elderly dog owner's encounter with the younger generation -- comprise this wickedly comical, existentially provocative look at life with pets. Director Todd Solondz can be a cruel and unusual god to his characters, and while Wiener-Dog shocks, the movie has a fanciful side, sporting dancing-dog videos and plenty of aw-gosh cuddling. Owning a pet is a colossal emotional undertaking. Wiener-Dog is the rare movie that treats it like one.

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Taika Waititi, director of last year's Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok, and Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords co-directed this hysterical, horrifying mockumentary about a group of vampires forced to share a house in Wellington, New Zealand. Life as an immortal bloodsucker isn't all it's cracked up to be -- the living accommodations alone are a nightmare. What We Do in the Shadows explores every possibility with crackling wit.

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The Witch (2015)

The Witch delivers everything we don't see in horror today. The backdrop, a farm in 17th-century New England, is pure misty, macabre mood. The circumstance, a Puritanical family making it on the fringe of society because they're too religious, bubbles with terror. And the question, whether devil-worshipping is hocus pocus or true black magic, keeps each character on their toes, and begging God for answers.The Witch tests its audience with its (nearly impenetrable) old English dialogue and the (anxiety-inducing) trials of early American life, but the payoff will keep your mind racing, and your face hiding under the covers, for days.

Zodiac (2007)

David Fincher's period drama is for obsessives. In telling the story of the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who captured the public imagination by sending letters and puzzles to the Bay Area press, the famously meticulous director zeroes in on the cops, journalists, and amateur code-breakers who made identifying the criminal their life's work. With Jake Gyllenhaal's cartoonist-turned-gumshoe Robert Graysmith at the center, and Robert Downey Jr.'s barfly reporter Paul Avery stumbling around the margins, the film stretches across time and space, becoming a rich study of how people search for meaning in life. Zodiac is a procedural thriller that makes digging through old manilla folders feel like a cosmic quest.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Ignore the fact that J.J. Abrams' latest Cloverfield movie isn't a straight sequel to the 2008 original, and you'll stumble into one of the eeriest thrillers in ages. 10 Cloverfield Lane, the story of three fated companions averting (theoretical) apocalypse in a subterranean bunker, runs like clockwork. Every 10 minutes Trachtenberg offers a new reveal, a new exacerbation of paranoia. Unnerving performances -- Winstead's troubled captive, Goodman's off-kilter parental figure, and Gallagher Jr. as a squeaky third wheel -- and a delight in madness prevent 10 Cloverfield Lane from settling on just one answer. It's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too horror movie, where the sights and sounds crescendo to the very last beat.

20th Century Women (2016)

If there's such thing as an epistolary movie, 20th Century Women is it. Touring 1970s Santa Barbara through a living flipbook, Mills's semi-autobiographical film transcends documentation with a cast of wayward souls and Jamie (Zumann), an impressionable young teenager. Bening plays his mother, and the matriarch of a ragtag family, who gather together for safety, dance to music when the moment strikes, and teach Jamie the important lesson of What Women Want, which ranges from feminist theory to love-making techniques. The kid soaks it up like a sponge. Through Mills's caring direction, and characters we feel extending infinitely through past and present, so do we.

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